
Qass ^.4 57 

Book ^ 



. l\u c 




wit ^suo w^$M%^. 






THE TWO PAGEANTS. 



A DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED IN THE 



fiul fug. fiiait. Sui|Braii ©Ijurclj, 



PITTSBURGH, PA. 



THURSDAY, JUNE 1st, 18G5 



CHARLES P. KRAUTH, D. D. 



' ' H e -w ill s -w alio ^v tip cleatli iix victory. 



PITTSBURGH: 

FEINTED BY \V. S. HAVEN, CORNER OP WOOD AND THIRD STREETS. 

1865. 



PiTTSBUiiGU, June 2, 1865. 
Rev. C. p. Krauth, D. D. 

Dear Sir — The Discourse pronounced by 
you in our Church, upon the occasion of the National Fast appointed 
in consequence of the sad calamity which bereft our country of so good 
a Ruler, seemed to those who heard it a most suitable memorial of 
the departed. 

We express to you but a common impulse in soliciting a copy of 
it for publication. 

Very truly, Yours, 



A. LA.NGE, M. D., 
WM. P. WEYiMAN, 
GEO. BLACK, 
ED. RAHM, 
J. D. CARLISLE, 
WM. F. LAXG, 
WM. N. OGDEN, 
ANDREW GETTY, 
D. ARMOR, 



J. S. NEWMYER, 
C. YEAGER, 
GEO. J. DUFF, 
C. L. GRAFF, 
A. H. LANE, 
C. MEYRAN, 
SAML. A. LONG, 
THOS. H. LANE, 
GEO. HUBLEY. 



PiiiLADELPUiA, June 6th, 1865. 



A. Laxge, M. D., and others, 



Gentlemen — I give into your hands the 



Discourse you so kindly request. 

Believe me very truly and gratefully'. 



Yours, 



CHARLES P. KRAUTIL 



DISCOURSE. 



In that historic and beautiful city of our State, in which 
our National Independence spoke, in her first perfect articu- 
lation, to listening nations, the form of him to whose memory 
we hallow this day of mourning was surrounded with the 
pageant of two great occasions. On both those days, thou- 
sands thronged the streets ; on both, the strains of music 
floated on the air ; on both, the measured step of soldier and 
sailor fell like an audible pulse upon the ear ; on both, the 
flag of our country was lifted above men ; on both, the centre 
toward which every eye and every heart turned was the same. 
Yet how diflerent were the days ! On the first, February 
21st, 18G1, darkness was on the heart of the nation : our flag 
had been dishonored — a wild, but as yet undefined fear, had 
risen in the midst of national prosperity and of happiness, 
which had been too rapturous and intoxicating to endure, and 
a long, low growl, as of some couching beast of blood, was 
making the hearts of men grow cold. Yet on that first day 
the exultant shouts rang out ; the time of quickening music was 
marked by the throbs it stirred in the bosoms of freemen ; 
(|uick was the pace, bright were the countenances of men ; 
the sunlight of hope seemed to break through the cloud and 



6 



to brighten around the forehead just bending itself to the 
burden ; and over all, as if it felt with those who loved it, 
the flag of freedom floated unconfined. It was a day of joy, 
when there seemed so much to make us sad. 

And the second day, April 22, 1865 — where stood the 
nation then? The awful cloud had been rifted and rolled 
back upon itself. The doubts and anguish of four dreary 
years had been dispelled — the right arm of conspiracy had 
been broken — the tiger that couched was crouching ; visions 
of peace, bliss, purity, freedom, unity, such as we had never 
enjoyed, were before us. The Red Sea whose waves of blood 
had lain full in our path, had opened — the nation had passed 
through, and looked back upon the wrecks of guilty ambition, 
floated up on the shores, or still whirling among the meeting 
waves. But the voice of praise was mute. The soft, low 
murmurs of sadness stirred like the whispering winds in the 
tops of the dark pines ; the tears of strong men fell with the 
sad wail of music ; the heavy pace told of the heavy heart ; 
and the flag of the free drooped in its bond of black. It was a 
day of sadness, when there seemed so much to make us glad. 
A horror of great darkness had fallen upon an exultant 
land. Triumph walked in the train of mourners, with ashes 
on her head ; and Peace, Avith Sadness by her side, wept such 
tears as war had never wrung from her. Over the pale form 
of the great Departed, Freedom and Unity had fallen, fainting 
in each others arms in the hour of victory. A whole nation, 
in the first anguish of an unspeakable loss, felt as if all that 
had been won, h;fd been won at too dear a price, in the forfeit 
of that one precious life. 

And yet it has needed but these few weeks to make that 
nation feel that the sickness of that awful hour was the un- 



conscious injustice which impulse does to principle. What ! 
shall we dishonor the memory of our glorious leader by 
dreaming that his work was so poorly done, that it lay at 
the mercy of an ounce of lead, a few grains of powder? 
Nay, more : shall we dishonor God by imagining that so 
sublime and rare a Avork of His hand as our murdered Presi- 
dent was, could really come under the will and thrall of a 
diabolical malignity so aspiring, yet so crawling — that God 
would mould such a heart, will and energy as distinguished 
him, and then permit so feeble a conclusion to them all: and 
that the destiny of millions of bondmen, and of millions of 
freemen — the future of America and the future of mankind, 
hung not upon the Omnipotent Arm, to be shaped by its in- 
struments, but hung upon the arm of the Devil, to be shaped 
by the finger of the assassin ? Oh ! the first pang of our 
hopelessness was the reaction of an unconscious atheism 
against an unconscious idolatry. The nation had risen to 
such an enthusiasm, so fond, deep, tender, for the gentle, 
noble, self-sacrificing and unshakable spirit who had led 
them out of the abyss of Avar to the heaven of opening peace 
and of the hopeful future, that we needed to have our eyes 
lifted. The person of great leaders is often the peril of their 
principles — the human race are all in instinct idolaters. The 
idol-breaker himself becomes the idol : the brazen serpent, 
which is but the symbol of divine mercy, becomes the object 
of Avorship — though made to lead men to God, it leads them 
away ; and the hammer with Avhich the brazen serpent is 
broken up is sure to absorb the worship of the thing it broke, 
if men are trusted Avith it. The people of the living God, of 
old, could not be trusted Avith the body of him who shaped 
them, in the faith of the one Eternal Spirit. His body must 



8 



be placed where no human eyes shall behold it — lest Moses 
shall undo the work of Moses, and the shrine of his ashes 
be the centre of the idolatry he abhorred. 

How came it that this intense national affection gathered 
around this man ? for it was all grown between the pageants. 
No man ever took the Presidential chair with less personal 
devotion, less enthusiasm, clustering around him. No man 
was ever chosen President of the United States so coldly on 
mere principle. He went into power not on the wave of 
popular entliusiasm, as did Jackson and Taylor ; not on the 
simple uplifting prompted by gratitude for great services, as 
did Washington; not by the well-defined, compacted party 
organization by which most of our Presidents have gone in. 
He was little known to the nation, little known to the masses 
of his own party — and beyond one or two great moral postu- 
lates, his party hardly knew its own landmarks. He was 
chosen neither because the nation knew him, nor because he 
knew himself, but because God knew him. The majority of 
the people were opposed to his election. As every one now 
sees that the providence of God was the cause of his election, 
so all have long seen that the political enemies of Abraham 
Lincoln were the occasion of it. And this is a noticeable 
element in the providence of this man of Providence, that 
as in the case of no other President, his enemies did for him 
what he could not do for himself, and what his friends could 
never have done. His enemies elected him by dividing their 
own strength — but when elected, he was helpless. A majority 
of the people was against him ; a majority of the House of 
Representatives was against him ; a majority of the Senate 
was against him ; a majority was against him in the Supreme 
Court; a majority of the officers in the army and navy was 



against him. Many who were destined by their genius and 
patriotism to shed lustre upon his administration, in the field 
and in the cabinet, were among his most earnest opponents. 
For all he could do, and his friends could do, he would 
have been forced to be a puppet of state, to go through four 
absurd years with the mere motions of rule — hardly with its 
motions. Who gave his administration its commanding 
position, and enabled it to do in four years what the sanguine 
had supposed would require centuries, what the doubting had 
believed never could be done ? The reply is, that the work 
was begun by his enemies, our country's enemies, the enemies 
of freedom. They in their malice so cunning, yet so narrow, 
wrought his glory, in seeking his shame; wrought redemption 
to the land they wished to destroy. They broke his fetters. 
in trying to strengthen the fetters of the slave ; and in at- 
tempting the murder of their country, committed suicide Avith 
the weapons they had prepared for parricide. 

But a great man can be made neither by enemies nor by 
friends : his enemies may open the occasion, his friends may 
give the opportunity, but God helping him, his greatness 
must be wrought out by himself. Between the untried Abra- 
ham Lincoln of the first pageant, and the well-tried and nobly 
vindicated Abraham Lincoln whose ashes were borne in the 
second, there seems to be a wonderful chasm. In the brief 
time between them, a man of the West was to be made the 
man of a continent — nay, a man to fix and justify the gaze 
of the world ; a lawyer was to be elevated into an investiga- 
tor, interpreter and defender of the Constitution ; a politician, 
honest, wise and good, yet dwarfed and narrowed of necessity 
in the limitations of his sphere, was to be shaped into a 
statesman ; and a man pre-eminent even in times of peace in 



10 



the spirit of peace was to be fitted for judgment and action 
in the vastest combinations in the whole history of human 
warfare. Simple, homely, rugged, self-depreciating, he was 
to play the first part in the greatest drama of modern history. 
He so performed that part that before his decisions the destiny 
of the race seemed to pause ; before the conflict, in which he 
was the very embodiment and representative of truth, freedom, 
right, and the great future of men. Czar, Emperor and Kings 
stood in suspense. Selfishness, appalled, dared not do the 
thing it would, and crawled in furtiveness to ignominy. The 
nations moved cautiously, as if oppressed with the feeling that 
their future was bound up in ours. And they wisely judged. 
Ours has been a great turning point of time — our land the 
Thermopylae for this battle of mankind. Not to have been 
utterly disgraced as leader of the race, in such a crisis, would 
be no common glory ; but Mr. Lincoln rose out of all mere 
negation into the positive grandeur of a great nature, fitting 
a great time. The whole world that wondered, now admires ; 
and from across the wide Atlantic, with the sympathetic tears 
of the nations comes this confession, that our crisis has been 
theirs, that the race is born again to hope of free life, and 
that humanity, broad as all continents, and all islands, and 
enduring as all time, owes more to Abraham Lincoln than to 
any other man of his generation. 

We do not forget how much Mr. Lincoln owed, and how 
much the world owes, to the true heart of the people, which, 
when the veil was taken away, hoped, trusted, and was firm 
with his. Yet the many always hang upon the few. It is by 
the true reformer, confessor, general, teacher, statesman, that 
the world moves. Do we not know that it was easier to find 
hundreds of thousands of noble soldiers, than to find one 



11 

trcncral— and without a general, whither wouhl tlic magnifi- 
cent resources of our country, and her wonderful armies, 
have taken us? Only to an all-engulfing ruin. And with 
our great cause, and our great people, whither would we have 
drifted in this war, without a civil leader? Whither had we 
drifted when men considered among the truest of the true 
were ready to give up all in despair ? Whither, but for a 
true leader — and of all men thought of for leaders, who would 
have been to us what Abraham Lincoln has been ? 

The nation, aroused, regenerated and saved, gave its grate- 
ful response to this question. With the first term of Mr. 
Lincoln's administration had been connected fearful sacrifices, 
enormous expenditure of treasure and of life ; there was 
hardly a hearth through the land to which sorrow had not 
come ; and yet, when the second canvas came, the cold acqui- 
escence of the first, in which the principle at stake barely 
held up the man — and with the large part of the people did 
not hold him up — had yielded to an intense enthusiasm of the 
whole nation, had given way to a popularity in which the man 
upheld and glorified the principle. In the first canvas, Mr. 
Lincoln recieved 1,857,610 votes, and 2,804,500 were cast 
ao-ainst him. In the second canvas, 1,811,754 votes were 

to 

cast against him, and 2,223,035 were cast for him. The 
vote for him in the first, and against him in the last, in round 
numbers Avas about the same. The numbers had changed from 
a minority to a majority; a majority of nearly half a million. 
The reasons of this vast change are manifold, but among 
the mightiest of them are to be put the character which Mr. 
Lincoln had revealed as a man and a ruler, and the great 
services he had done. He had shown himself one of the 
people. lie understood them, and they understood him. He 



12 



had shown that he had a heart, and that it was Avith the many; 
and the many gave him back love for love. The integrity, 
simplicity, openness, which had marked him as a private 
citizen, did not forsake him in his august position. Clear in 
his conviction of principle, he was a model of firmness when 
his decision was made, as he was of unajBTected deference and 
modesty in the use of good counselors ; and what he saw 
should be done, he did with an ability so calm, even and un- 
demonstrative, that men found it almost impossible to appre- 
ciate it. "One thunderstorm makes more noise in the world 
than is made by the sunshine of ages." The exquisite direct- 
ness and simplicity which spring only from true profundity, 
prevented men from seeing his depth. The slightest dash of 
the charlatan, the faintest concession, to the spirit Avhich 
wishes to have the kingdom of heaven come with at least a 
little observation, would have helped many a man earlier to 
see how wise and great a man God had given us for this 
perilous time. A little of Cicero's self-consciousness and 
self-assertion would have made the less thoughtful sooner 
acquainted with Mr. Lincoln's grandeur of character. But 
his noble earnestness was too hearty for display. lie con- 
fessed his mistakes with a charming frankness, but had 
notliing to say of his successes. He was not a man who 
walked invisibly, and dwelt in labyrinths, and loved silence 
for its own sake ; and yet he was a man whose language 
carried more weight than ancient oracles. He comprehended 
not his o\Yn depth. It was great in him that he never imagined 
himself great. The cause of the negro, and the common cause 
of the poor white, made the negro and the poor man greater 
in tlicir cause, in his eyes, than he seemed to himself in the 
chair of chief ruler of a great people. He was firm, not 



13 



because of that imposing self-reliance, that grand egotism 
which has made some great men firm. He vras not the man 
to say, Ccesarem vehis. He had no star of destiny. He was 
like Luther, sure because his cause was of God : outside of 
his cause he looked upon himself as nothing, and was firm 
simply because of his clear moral perception, and his in- 
vincible loyalty to right and truth. 

In the true sense, Abraham Lincoln was gloriously a man 
of one idea. The man who has more than one idea, has false 
ideas, or holds the truth in unrighteousness. The man who 
lives for more than one idea, lives in vain. Abraham Lincoln 
had but one fundamental principle — one grand idea, in 
statesmanship. This was the thread of his life. That princi- 
ple is, The absolute right of the right. He asked only, What 
is right? and that question answered, he knew no second 
one ; and planted on this principle he could not give up. 
Disaster changes policy, but it cannot change right. The 
issue of the whole contest betAveen the Rebellion and the 
Constitution, hung from the beginning upon the question, 
Who is the more in earnest ? and the solution of that 
question lay already in the heart of Abraham Lincoln ; for 
however fell and fixed was the purpose of bad men to destroy 
this Union, the purpose of Abraham Lincoln was more fixed 
that they should not do it: and the reason, supreme and 
beyond all debate, which fixed his resolve, was not that it 
was impolitic, or humiliating, or painful, that the rebellion 
should succeed, but that it was wrong ; it was not that the 
maintenance of the Constitution was something politic and 
glorious, but that it was right. Therefore was he 

" Constant as the Northern star. 
That unassailable holds on his rank 
Unshak'd of motion." 



14 



He rose out of the narrowness even of that selfish and 
criminal nationalism which arrogates to itself the name of 
patriotism. He had something sublimer than the motto, "My 
country, right or wrong." That motto suited the rebellion, 
with the definition it put upon it. It was the motto of Stone- 
wall Jackson and of Lee, who waived the question of right, 
and in the name of what they called their country, fought 
against their country — for the wrong against the right. That 
motto did not suit Abraham Lincoln. His motto was: My 
country, because she is right ; freedom, because it is right ; 
the Union, the Constitution, the laws, because they are right. 

With his conviction of the right went that hopefulness which 
is the necessary result of a genuine conviction of the right, 
grounded in a true perception of its nature. No man sees 
the right in its own essence, without feeling that it is un- 
conquerable — that men have only to be true to it, and it will 
vindicate, by ultimate victory, their faith and fidelity. As 
if his name had gone before by prophecy, this Abraham 
proved himself, like the first, a faithful father of faithful 
sons, and "against hope believed in hope." For in the 
historical life of men, as in the religious, faith justifies. There 
is nothing which has such wear in it as a sublime trust in a 
good cause because it is good. Abraham Lincoln had faith 
in God, faith in freedom, faith in truth, faith in his country ; 
and the victory which overcame all the deadly opposition to 
God, freedom, truth, and our land, was pre-eminently the 
victory of his faith. As there are hours of storm upon 
rock-bound coasts, when the arm of the sailor and the strength 
of the ship are nothing, and the long radiance which streams 
from the lighthouse is everything, so there were hours when 
his lone faith was more to us than all our armies. 



15 



In the immortal fellowsliip of the history of the world's 
best and greatest sons, Abraham Lincoln will come, in an 
extraordinary degree, into manifold comparisons and close re- 
lations. With some of the greatest, he will come into com- 
parison with reference to his personal traits; with some, by 
his wonderful rise from obscurity into the earnest and ad- 
miring notice of mankind ; with some, by the greatness of the 
services he has rendered ; with some, by his dearness to the 
heavt of his nation, and of the race; and with some, by his 
tragic end. In his personal traits, men will think of him 
with Luther in his playful unbendings amid the loved ones of 
the home. In the magnitude of his services in the Chair, 
posterity will place him by the side of Washington. xVs a 
Defender of the Constitution, his name connects itself with 
the names of Hamilton and Madison, of Story and Webster, 
and of all its illustrious framers and expounders. As the 
orator whose every breath was consecrated to freedom and 
the land of tlie free, men will think of him with Patrick 
Henry and Clay ; and in his noble frankness and firmness, 
with Jackson. In his relations to an oppressed race, and in 
his efforts at emancipation by the power of a purified public 
sentiment, he will be conjoined with Wilbcrforce and the 
second Adams. His tragic end, by the assassin's hand, as 
the defender of his native land against fraud, force and con- 
spiracy, associates him. with William of Nassau ; and as one 
who bore himself nobly in times of fraternal strife, and gave 
to law and right, victory in the cruel ordeal of civil war, and 
who, falling in the hour of triumph, dying, made his work 
deathless, he will be remembered with Gustavus Adolphus, 
the hero of our Protestant faith. 

And not by sufferance nor by mere suggestion, docs he 



16 



take, in some low place, his position among immortal men. 
Among the great of humble origin, who was more thoroughly 
self-made than he, and yet so absolute in all the grand 
elements of a rounded, self-poised well-making"*? Who among 
them all had a judgment more clear ? Who was more thorough- 
ly grounded than he, in the right ? Who among them all was 
more distinguished by moderation, by that happy union 
of flexibility and firmness which makes a man yielding of 
preferences to secure principle, and heroically intolerant for 
principle over against all preferences, whether of his own 
or other men's, and over against all policy which assumes 
that it may be wise to do wrong ? Who among them all met 
a vast responsibility with a sublimer purpose, and a more 
steadily growing adaptation to it than his, until he did not so 
much seem to represent our people as to embody and epito- 
mize them? They made him their head, he made himself 
their heart; and the absolute unity of freedom surpassed the 
absoluteness of despotism. The world looked on astonish- 
ed to see a vast country as compact as a little state, and the 
freest government ever established on earth, presenting that 
firmness, force and promptness, which freedom's friends them- 
selves had once considered as only possible in monarchies. 
It was the wonderful combination of excellencies in Abraham 
Lincoln which made it possible, and put the forces of free- 
dom more completely under the control of one great policy, 
than all the art and all the severity of the leaders of rebellion 
were able to secure for them over their instruments and 
victims. The deep of wicked cunning was too shallow for 
the simple-hearted, open earnestness of principle. 

That this man was good, is conceded ; but we, who belong 
to early posterity, anticipate and pronounce the verdict of its 



17 



latest generation, when we say he was great. In the grand 
assembly of good men which gives voice to the eternal Te 
Deum in the inmost court of the Great Temple, how freely 
may he move^ acknowledged as a Prince of God among them 
all. He may take hig place with the goodly fellowship of the 
prophets of freedom whose early voices anticipated its future : 
or with the glorious company of its apostles, who, through 
weariness and pain, proclaimed its evangel of deliverance to 
the captive, and announced the acceptable year of the Lord : 
among the noble army who joyously sealed with their blood 
the witness of their lives, he shall lift that brow on which 
the pang of death has left no trace, no charactery but that 
of the blood-red jewel of martyrdom, set amid gems of softer 
light. 

But the greatness of Abraham Lincoln was not an in- 
spiration — it was a development. Nothing great is made in 
the height of its greatness, yet that which becomes great 
must have the capacity of development. An oak is not made 
an oak ; it must grow : but you can only grow it from an 
acorn, and its growth cannot be carried on far in a flower-pot. 
The ocean, and great meuntains, and Niagara, great pictures, 
great books, and great eras, alone make men capacious of 
themselves. You can stretch the human soul to the oceanic 
on the ocean alone; and little souls, thin in the warp and woof, 
are torn in the stretching. Mr. Lincoln was undeveloped 
when the first roar of the surf of the wild and storm-tossed 
ocean of civil strife struck upon his ear, but he grew to the 
position, till his soul not alone swelled to the measure of the 
great deep, but passed beyond it, and apprehended that of 
which it had been apprehended. The happy years of peace 
could not fit a man for the struggles of this unexampled war. 
2 



18 



But he came with the capacity of development — his great soul 
did not break in the tension. His views became larger, his 
grasp broader and more tenacious; his style assumed weight 
and solemnity; the sublimest elements of religion seemed to 
penetrate it more and more, till his latest words breathed the 
purest spirit of a higher world. His very appearance changed, 
his face bore the traces of the sublime struggle and great 
victories of his time ; and posterity, when they gaze upon the 
mild, thoughtful, earnest, sad lineaments presented in the 
latest and best pictures of him, will be at a loss to account for 
the allusions so often made, sometimes in malice, sometimes 
in playfulness, by friend and foe, to the homeliness of his 
visage. He was a true type, even in this change, of the land 
he loved — great, strong, and careless of beauty, yet growing 
toward it in the refinings of trial. What he did was in keep- 
ing with what he was. Every faculty and grace of his ripest 
nature was brought in play, taxed, and tested, in his work, 
a work wholly unique in its grandeur and difficulty. Four 
words tell the issue: That work was done. He was 

*' Our chief of men, who through a cloud 
Not of war only, but detraction rude, 
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, 
To peace and truth his glorious way had ploughed." 



We have tried to embody our impressions of what this noble 
man was to his friends ; but it is due to his memory that we 
should say what he was to his enemies. His self-control and 
patience were wonderful. Never was a man more sorely test- 
ed, not only by open warfare, pursued Avith every aggravation 
of malignity and baseness, but by the no less unscrupulous 
warfare of falsehood and partisanship. But not only was no 



19 

act of policy dictated or changed by personal feeling, but not 
a word was wrung from him breathing defiance or hatred. To 
his foes as to his friends, his course was dictated by the sacred 
claims of right. He made more sacrifices to do justice to his 
enemies than most men would make to secure it for their 
friends. He steadily discriminated in his judgment and acts 
between those who led the rebellion, and those who were 
seduced or forced into it; and his pleadings with both were 
full of a noble pathos. He held himself in check by the 
Constitution toward the very men who were striving to over- 
throw it. The blow which the world would have justified, and 
at length grew impatient for, he long withheld, because his 
heart shrunk from striking even the bad. His was a nature 
so remote from the sanguinary, that the blows he gave were 
prompted not so much by hatred of the bad, as by intense 
love of the good. 

His heart was as tender as a woman's ; and his patience 
was a soul of peace within him, while warfare raged around 
him. Human in every fibre, and humane in every pulse, he 
yet, in the sacred absorption of duty, seemed to be passionless. 
The winds and waves of rage which swept over him and the 
Ship of State, seemed to move him to passion no more than 
winds and waves move the pilot. So far as resentment was 
concerned, he treated men as irresponsible things. Only so 
that the Ship of State might be carried through her struggles, 
he not only cared not on what shores those wild waves might 
spend their fury, or in what forest those fierce winds might 
roar, but he cared not how they might break in deluge or 
tornado over himself. He was no Jonah, to murmur at for- 
giveness to repentant Nineveh; he required not the question, 
Doest thou well to be angry ? He breathed the spirit of the 



20 



first Abraham, and in the noble faith that a few redeeming 
righteous ones might be found in the midst of corruption, 
pleaded against the impending vengeance. 

Linked with his geniality to friends, his kindliness to foes, 
there was one trait of Mr. Lincoln, which has been made the 
object of coarse assault by his enemies, and which has often 
been defended by his friends rather by way of mild depreca- 
tion than of approval — we mean his abounding wit, humor 
and anecdote. Nothing could display a more complete igno- 
rance of character, than to imagine that these gifts are evi- 
dences of a want of seriousness of nature. There is a humor 
which is the saddest thing in the world, and a mournful irony 
often touches what lies too deep for tears. They are often the 
shield of the sensitive, and the interpretation by which the 
benevolent render into the laughable what was meant to be 
malicious. Luther used them in his conflict with Papal cor- 
ruption ; Pascal employed them against the Jesuits ; with 
them Addison, and Swift, and Sydney Smith, attacked moral, 
social and political abuses ; with them the greatest novelists 
of our era have opened the hearts of men to humanity ; the 
sacred writers themselves are not destitute of them. They 
are of God; as really divine in their nature, and as capable 
of sanctified use, as eloquence, poetry, or the arts. All 
thorough men of the people are men of anecdote. Mr. Lin- 
coln tried to be cheerful to keep the nation in heart; tried to 
find some little element of the ludicrous in the conduct of his 
enemies, because his kind heart shrunk from looking at it 
without something to break the horror of its unrelieved 
wickedness. And how wise was his wit and his story! He 
hid sometimes an overwhelming body of truth in some ambush 
of sportiveness, and took by the strategy of an anecdote what 



21 



would have held out against the regular approach of logic. 
There were times when he was the saddest of all innocent 
men in the world, but even then he could shake off for a 
moment the burden in some pleasant apologue, or find relief 
for his uncorrupted simplicity of heart in the rich and quaint 
store of anecdote gathered and first enjoyed when he was 
not great, but very happy. In these things, and in all his 
kindly unreserve, he was, as in all else, ever his own true self, 
without evasion, affectation or pretence. 

Such he was — so great in his nature, so great in his work ; 
so firm, yet so forgiving ; so true to his land, yet so gentle to 
its foes ; so unconscious, so genial, so childlike. When we 
think of him in the grandeur of his mission and of his destiny, 
we feel as if some great orb of the heavens had been quench- 
ed. When we think of him in his tenderer traits, our eyes grow 
dim, as if some loved one, the "frolic and the gentle," had 
vanished from our own hearth, and left it all cold and bare. 
Never did a national loss assume more thoroughly the charac- 
ter of a private sorrow; in the hearts of a great people 
there was mourning as if death were in their own homes. He 
had won the profoundest respect and most devoted love of his 
whole land. What was there, when the full hour of the con- 
summation of such a man had come, for God to do to crown 
His own work in him ? There was but one thing possible 
which could move more deeply the enthusiasm of love for such 
a man. He had reached the very height of all that he could do, 
or that could be done, for his country. Out of the chaos of dis- 
union and civil war wrought by slavery, he had brought us 
peace, unity and universal freedom. What could he do but 
simply touch in detail the master-piece? Our fathers had 
completed but the bust of the statue of Liberty. Abraham 



22 



Lincoln left it a full length. The work of the chisel was 
done, and it only remained to smooth and polish it. He had 
reached the summit of his toil and of his glory, and what 
was left him hut to stand still, or to begin to descend ? To 
restrain a national pride already reacting against our sore 
chastenings — to preserve the uniqueness of the divine con- 
ception of this wonderful history of a child of Providence — 
to hallow by his blood the principle for which he had lived, 
and to fix it forever in the heart of the people — to open 
the eyes of the most deluded to the true character of the 
demon power against which he had struggled — to melt the 
hatred of the prostrate yet chafing rebellion, and of its allies 
throughout the world — these may have been in the mind of 
God. A dark cloud closed for a moment around the object 
of the fondest gaze of millions ; the flash as of a sparkle 
struck from some wheel of fire, burned for a moment in the 
eyes of the nation: cloud and sparkle vanished, and on the 
cold earth there lay only the mantle. He — was gone ; but one 
convulsive sob of a whole land, stricken, astounded, heart-sick, 
in a loss too great, a grief too deep for comprehension, fol- 
lowed him in the cry: "My father, my father, the chariot of 
Israel, and the horsemen thereof." 

Gone, but not dead. Gone, but not lost. He lives in the 
life of that for which he lived, and is immortal in the love of 
those for whom he died ; for life cannot die, and love is the 
life of the heart, most deathless of all deathless things. A 
living man was the honored one in the first pageant: an im- 
mortal man hallowed the second. He is not dead, but is more 
surely living, lifted by death beyond death's dominion ; he is 
not silent, but is forever articulate ; he is not cast down, but 
through all time from his throne among regal men glorified. 



23 



he will sway thought, feeling and action, not alone in the land 
of his birth, but in all free lands, and in all lands yearning to 
be free. His spirit has not vanished, his life has not passed 
away, as the trace of a cloud. The violent death which bowed 
that anxious head, has but the sooner crowned it ; he is only 
the mightier because he lies low. His grave is at this horn- 
the centre of more moral life, of more solemn resolve, of more 
assured hope, than moves around all the thrones of earth. 
No living man is doing or can do, for our land, or for our 
race, what this proto-martyr of America's full redemption, 
and perfect unity and abiding peace, has sealed in dying, and 
continues to do in death. Be then our sorrow buried in his 
grave. His life has lifted that of his people and of his time ; 
his life perpetuates a nobler, better and happier life in his 
kind ; his life throbs in the heart of a regenerate nation, and 
shall throb as long as that nation has a heart to beat. If the 
day shall come when it may be truly said that the life of 
Abraham Lincoln has vanished from earth, then shall the 
pulse of Freedom herself lie still and cold beneath the eager 
fingers which grope, but grope in vain, to find it. 






LB S '12 



